AlwaysOn™ Nurse Safety Platform

The AlwaysOn™ Nurse Safety Platform helps nurses stay safe while conducting life-saving work. Even before COVID-19 struck, 18 million U.S. healthcare workers experienced unprecedentedly high rates of assault from patients or their families. These same studies show EMS and psychiatry ward staff experience the brunt of the violence. The AlwaysOn™ Nurse Safety proprietary platform leverages panic buttons and fail-safe Bluetooth technology to provide precise bed location and multiple backup systems to ensure staff can summon help to their location with the touch of a button. If scaled globally, AlwaysOn™ could serve the needs of the 38% of health workers abroad who also experience this violence. Further, the AlwaysOn™ Nurse Safety Platform could serve dual purposes. With the influx of patients, field hospitals are being constructed which lack a nurse call system for patient safety. If needed, hospitals could utilize AlwaysOn™ as both nurse and patient safety platform. 

Everyday, millions of nurses, 80% of whom are women, put themselves at risk when going to work. There are 18 million health workers operating within the U.S. alone, who are 16x more likely to experience workplace violence than most other workers. A study published in 2014 reported that 76% of registered nurses experienced violence while on the job, but 40-80% of the violent incidents go unreported. A couple of different factors are contributing to this larger issue: 

1. Mental health programs are being defunded, increasing the number of patients who come to Emergency Rooms struggling with mental health.

2. The substance abuse pandemic is worsening, increasing the number of patients who enter health care facilities while high. 

3. A nursing shortage within the healthcare industry exists due to job dissatisfaction, often stemming from workplace violence. 

WHO reports that as many as 38% of health workers reported physical violence while working, and more suffer emotional and verbal aggression. With the rapid spread and high incidence of COVID-19, many health care workers voiced that they feel more unprotected and unsafe than usual. Moreover, nurses face added difficulties when treating their patients in temporary hospitals due to the lack of nurse-call systems.

The AlwaysOn nurse safety platform is a wireless call system that summons help when a nurse is in duress. The five components of the platform include 1. panic buttons 2. smart beacons 3. gateway 4. access point and 5. alert console. Our proprietary platform utilizes bluetooth to triangulate nurses and patients with the touch of a button and summon help to their exact location. 

A typical use case looks like: 

1. Maria is attending to a patient in Room 409 and encounters a problem. She presses the panic button.

2. Our Smart Beacon detects the alarm and her location. 

3. The gateway sends the alarm to the Alert Console & mobile push notifications are sent to predetermined contacts.

4. Our mobile app keeps the contacts updated on her real-time location until they arrive.

In addition to BLE and smart beacons, we leverage cloud services to send the alerts and an access point to provide redundancies (e.g. if wifi fails, it alternates between two LTE ports to ensure it is sent) and dead spot protection (in case parts of the building have poor or unreliable cell or wifi coverage).

The AlwaysOn™ Nurse Safety Platform is built for nurses, and tangentially, serves healthcare facilities and their patients. An NCSBN study reported that 19.2% of Registered Nurses (RNs)  identified as non-white/of ethnic minority, while a more racially diverse, 29% of Licensed Practical Nurses (LPNs) and Vocational Nurses (VNs), identified as non-white/of ethnic minority. Further, hospitals were reportedly the preferred employment setting for 55.7% of RNs, while the nursing home/extended care setting was the most common work for 31.7% of LPN/VNs. Different studies find that up to 21% of first-year nurses leave the profession because of workplace violence. Our safety solution leverages direct feedback from all types of nurses and we utilize design thinking to iterate our features to provide true protection. Our first 3-month pilot will engage nurses bi-weekly to assess how the platform can be improved. Quick releases will allow us expedite feedback and surveys will measure the impact of our solution. The AlwaysOn™ Nurse Safety Platform will address nurses’ needs by increasing their perceived and physical safety. We believe our solution will not only provide peace of mind, but it will also improve morale and productivity, while reducing turnover.

Nurses are essential workers and our healthcare systems would not function without them. A 2016 study predicted a 21% increase in nationwide demand for nurses by 2025. Coupled with 21% of first-year nurses leaving the occupation due to workplace violence, safety solutions will be instrumental in recruiting and retaining nurses. Studies show that violence against health workers can lead to monetary and non-monetary losses for healthcare facilities. Workplace violence costs facilities hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment, and hiring expenses. Further, fatigue, injury, and stress of health workers is tied to higher risk of patient infections and medication error.

The AlwaysOn™ Nurse Safety Platform is innovative in how it leverages hardware to efficiently, reliably, and cost-effectively protect staff. Our biggest competitors are Centrak and Stanley Healthcare, both of which require hospitals to have heavy infrastructure, pay a hefty up-front financial investment, and hard-wire bulky, intrusive hardware into hospital walls.  

ROAR for Good started as a B2C company. We designed, built, and manufactured panic buttons for women. Leveraging that expertise has allowed us to utilize our award-winning, custom-designed panic button with recessed one-click activation for easy access and to “not cry wolf” via false alarms, which now serves as a key component of our AlwaysOn™ Nurse Safety Platform. 

Further, we are well-positioned within the market to target hospitals searching for a light-weight, more cost-effective nurse safety solution with smaller, more attractive buttons and a system that is much easier to maintain.

In 2014, our CEO Yasmine Mustafa started ROAR for Good to re-invent safety tech for women, by women. By 2017, our product was the leading safety wearable on the market, received multiple awards, and tens of thousands of wearables were sold in over 45 countries via major retailers. We leveraged the same wearable when we shifted to focusing on workplace safety to protect vulnerable workers in 2018. We introduced AlwaysOn™- the most accurate, reliable & cost-effective wireless staff safety solution built with feedback from key stakeholders. When an Alert Device is pressed, the closest in-room Smart Beacon picks up the signal. The distress signal is relayed from Beacon to Beacon until it reaches Gateway & Access Point. The Gateway uses WiFi (or LTE via Access Point as a backup if necessary) to assure live alerts are sent via cloud. The alert Console receives and displays alert and mobile push notifications are received by team contacts. This AlwaysOn™ Staff Safety platform is currently installed in over thousands of hotel rooms around the United States. To contribute to COVID-19 disaster relief efforts, we built the AlwaysOn™ Nurse Safety Platform which utilizes similar software and interfaces that our B2C product and original AlwaysOn™ product does. This technology works and we are dedicated to making adjustments based on feedback from nurses. 

The AlwaysOn™ Nurse Safety Platform is in the pilot stage and we are currently considering applications from healthcare facilities and hospitals. We will look to serve at least ten hospitals within the first year, meaning we would protect at least 5,750 nurses*. In five years, our goal is to have at least 8% (or 480 hospitals of the 6,000 in the US, protecting almost 276,000 nurses*)- Since our hardware is FCC and CE certified, we will have less friction when we are ready to expand internationally. We will focus on the US and scale appropriately based on similar markets, resources, demand, regulatory factors, government considerations, as well as customs. 

(*Assuming average hospital size of 250 beds with 2.3 nurses per bed)

ROAR’s vision is an inclusive and compassionate world where, together, everyone is empowered to thrive. Our mission is to engage communities using technology and education to foster peace of mind and empathy. 

COVID has elevated workplace safety as a matter of public health. First, we are expanding our services from addressing the 1.8 million hotel housekeepers, 58% of which experience sexual harassment on the job to healthcare workers and protecting the 18 million nurses who are vulnerable to assault. We will likely focus on nurse safety before expanding to other verticals for at least the next 3 years depending on the sales cycle of selling to hospitals and market penetration achieved. From there we will either expand to other verticals (such as universities, real estate, cruise ships, etc) or focus on international expansion. Our plan will likely evolve with market feedback and the results of social impact scorecard. 

We are a diverse collection of leaders bringing relevant experiences and ingenuity to ROAR for Good products and relations. As a former undocumented immigrant, CEO and Co-Founder, Yasmine Mustafa was emboldened to start ROAR for Good to provide peace of mind to vulnerable workers, most of whom, are women of color and immigrants themselves. She sold her first startup company and won many awards, such as BBC’s 100 Women of 2016. Our CTO and Head of Hardware have a unique mix of business and technical expertise. Their lean startup and design thinking backgrounds led to our award-winning product and the creation of our patent-pending AlwaysOn technology.  Supported by a passionate team dedicated to making the world a safer place as well as an advisory board of key stakeholders from the industry (both decision makers and users), our skills, background, and experiences that make us uniquely positioned to deliver the solution and solve the problem. 

We will start with our own direct sales team to learn about the sales process. To achieve quicker scale, we will gradually bring on resellers who can sell, deploy, and support our solution. Our margins are sufficient to allow for a performance-based commission structure and supplies them with the ability to offer asset-light solutions compared to competitors who require heavy infrastructure. We have 3 revenue streams: 

1. upfront hardware costs

2. monthly subscription for the platform based on the number of Smart Beacons installed

3. installation & training

We will be funded by outside investors as well as revenue from our services. Our social impact is inherent within our solution for a few reasons: 

1. We shift the financial burden from low and middle income women to the employer, increasing engagement and safety. 

2. The nature of our product in itself is to serve peace of mind to the users.